scholarly journals Jump-starting life? Fundamental aspects of synthetic biology

2015 ◽  
Vol 210 (5) ◽  
pp. 687-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petra Schwille
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Biology ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Short Article ◽  
The Core ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Living Unit

What is life and how could it originate? This question lies at the core of understanding the cell as the smallest living unit. Although we are witnessing a golden era of the life sciences, we are ironically still far from giving a convincing answer to this question. In this short article, I argue why synthetic biology in conjunction with the quantitative sciences may provide us with new concepts and tools to address it.

scholarly journals The first 10 years of the international coordination network for standards in systems and synthetic biology (COMBINE)

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Waltemath ◽  
Martin Golebiewski ◽  
Michael L Blinov ◽  
Padraig Gleeson ◽  
Henning Hermjakob ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Biology ◽  
Data Model ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The Past ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Stakeholder Workshop ◽  
Software Engineers ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Modeling In Biology

AbstractThis paper presents a report on outcomes of the 10th Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE) meeting that was held in Heidelberg, Germany, in July of 2019. The annual event brings together researchers, biocurators and software engineers to present recent results and discuss future work in the area of standards for systems and synthetic biology. The COMBINE initiative coordinates the development of various community standards and formats for computational models in the life sciences. Over the past 10 years, COMBINE has brought together standard communities that have further developed and harmonized their standards for better interoperability of models and data. COMBINE 2019 was co-located with a stakeholder workshop of the European EU-STANDS4PM initiative that aims at harmonized data and model standardization for in silico models in the field of personalized medicine, as well as with the FAIRDOM PALs meeting to discuss findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data sharing. This report briefly describes the work discussed in invited and contributed talks as well as during breakout sessions. It also highlights recent advancements in data, model, and annotation standardization efforts. Finally, this report concludes with some challenges and opportunities that this community will face during the next 10 years.

scholarly journals Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia Roosth
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Coral Reef ◽  
Synthetic Biology ◽  
Coral Reefs ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Research Initiative ◽  
Folk Theories

ArgumentWhat does “life” become at a moment when biological inquiry proceeds by manufacturing biological artifacts and systems? In this article, I juxtapose two radically different communities, synthetic biologists and Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef crafters (HCCR). Synthetic biology is a decade-old research initiative that seeks to merge biology with engineering and experimental research with manufacture. The HCCR is a distributed venture of three thousand craftspeople who cooperatively fabricate a series of yarn and plastic coral reefs to draw attention to the menace climate change poses to the Great Barrier and other reefs. Interpreting these two groups alongside one another, I suggest that for both, manufacturing biological artifacts advances their understandings of biology: in a rhetorical loop, they build new biological things in order to understand the things they are making. The resulting fabrications condense scientific and folk theories about “life” and also undo “life” as a coherent analytic object.

Towards 'coring' and 'aboutness': an approach to some aspects of in-depth indexing

1982 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 167-170
Author(s):  
Shawky Salem
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Analysis ◽  
The Core ◽  
New Concepts

Some ideas about in-depth indexing are presented. Any document can be considered from two points: the core of the document which is usually one subject expressed by one term and the aboutness of the document which is usually many subjects expressed by several keywords and terms which may be either relative or non-relative to the core term. An experimental analysis with a sample of 100 petroleum documents using these new concepts appears to show that the terms unrelated to the core term must be reduced and the primary and minor relative terms need to be increased. The computing operation of the graduated aboutness is a way to weight the types of aboutness in in-depth indexing.

scholarly journals Exploring the recontextualisation of biology in the CAPS for Life Sciences

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Johnson ◽  
Edith Dempster ◽  
Wayne Hugo
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
African Students ◽  
The Core ◽  
Assessment Policy ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Policy Statements ◽  
Hierarchical Nature ◽  
Parent Discipline ◽  
Recent Version

This study is concerned with the recontextualisation of biology in the most recent version of the South African Life Sciences curriculum, the CAPS (Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements). The following aspects of the curriculum were assessed: the balance of canonical and humanistic material, the inclusion and weighting of the core concepts of biology, and the overall curriculum coherence. The results were compared with those for earlier versions of the curriculum, and the implications for South African students are considered. The study reveals that, according to these criteria, the content material of the CAPS faithfully reflects the hierarchical nature of its parent discipline biology.

A Reflection on the Notion of Cohabitation within and Beyond the Walls of Life Sciences

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Eleonore Pauwels
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Biology ◽  
National Science Foundation ◽  
Sustainability Science ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
National Research Council ◽  
Boundary Crossing ◽  
University Of Virginia ◽  
New Biology ◽  
The University ◽  
Bio Engineering

Synthetic biology is at the front edge of a wave the National Research Council has termed the “New Biology” which involves bio, info, nano, and cognitive sciences. A lot of innovation will occur in the interstitial or “white” spaces between these disciplines, but this emerging multi-disciplinary science will provide challenges in term of social governance: there will likely be new challenges in managing ethical, social, and legal issues at the boundaries between disciplines. As an attempt to reflect on these challenges, a major workshop, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (SES-0925449) and organized in May 2010 by the Wilson Center and the University of Virginia, gathered experts from three emergent, boundary-crossing translational and transnational fields: STS, sustainability science and synthetic biology. Among other inputs, the workshop’s participants reached a significant and key conclusion. In the future, scientists will need effective, symmetric and balanced interdisciplinary collaborations about sustainable governance of emerging technologies that respond to environmental, societal and technological challenges in a comprehensive way. This requires a serious rethinking and re-organization of life sciences (bio-engineering) education.

Resisting Piratic Method by Doing Research Otherwise

Sociology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Tilley
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The Political ◽  
The South ◽  
The Core ◽  
Intellectual Commons

The reconstruction of sociology into connected sociologies works towards a truly global and plural discipline. But if undoing the overrepresentation of European epistemology in sociology requires a deeper engagement with epistemologies of the South or worlds and knowledges otherwise, how can we ensure that such engagements do not simply reproduce colonial forms of appropriation and domination? Here I consider means of resisting extractive, or ‘piratic’ method in sociology research by drawing lessons from recent debates around geopiracy and biopiracy in geography and the life sciences. The core claim of this article is that any decolonial knowledge production must involve a consideration of the political economy of knowledge – its forms of extraction, points of commodification, how it is refined as intellectual property, and how it comes to alienate participating knowers. Against this I suggest a relearning of method in an anti-piratic way as a means of returning our work to the intellectual commons.

scholarly journals Computer model of information behavior to study information security professionals

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-31
Author(s):  
Paulo Hideo Ohtoshi ◽  
Cláudio Gottschalg Duque
Keyword(s):  
Information Security ◽  
Computer Model ◽  
Information Behavior ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Human Information Behavior ◽  
The Core ◽  
Current State ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Programming Tools ◽  
Core Concepts

In this paper, we propose a computer model of information behavior to study information security professionals and an architecture, which mimics the way our brain learns new concepts to simulate this behavior computationally. Used to represent and describe any domain of knowledge, we may use ontologies to study the human information behavior and show some of the concepts and relation-ships involved in this field of knowledge. A deep knowledge of the core concepts underpinning this field can provide us with a solid basis for constructing a model. We can also use computer-programming tools not only to capture the ideas that make up this field of knowledge, but can also simulate the human information behavior. The use of computers also allows us to crawl data over the Internet and process large amounts of them in order to find patterns with some specific characteristics. In the paper, we also present the current state of this research and challenges of the model.

scholarly journals The ELIXIR Core Data Resources: fundamental infrastructure for the life sciences

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Drysdale ◽  
Charles E. Cook ◽  
Robert Petryszak ◽  
Vivienne Baillie-Gerritsen ◽  
Mary Barlow ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Life Science ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Health Sector ◽  
Biological Data ◽  
Supplementary Information ◽  
Science Data ◽  
Data Infrastructure ◽  
Data Resource ◽  
Core Data ◽  
The Core

AbstractMotivationLife science research in academia, industry, agriculture, and the health sector depends critically on free and open data resources. ELIXIR (www.elixir-europe.org), the European Research Infrastructure for life sciences data, has identified a set of Core Data Resources within Europe that are of most fundamental importance for the long-term preservation of biological data. We explore characteristics of their usage, impact and assured funding horizon to assess their value and importance as an infrastructure, to understand sustainability of the infrastructure, and to demonstrate a model for assessing Core Data Resources worldwide.ResultsThe nineteen resources currently designated ELIXIR Core Data Resources form a data infrastructure in Europe which is a subset of the worldwide open life science data infrastructure. We show that, from 2014 to 2018, data managed by the Core Data Resources more than tripled while staff numbers increased by less than a tenth. Additionally, support for the Core Data Resources is precarious: together they have assured funding for less than a third of current staff after four years.Our findings demonstrate the importance of the ELIXIR Core Data Resources as repositories for research data and knowledge, while also demonstrating the uncertain nature of the funding environment for this infrastructure. ELIXIR is working towards longer-term support for the Core Data Resources and, through the Global Biodata Coalition, aims to ensure support for the worldwide life science data resource infrastructure of which the ELIXIR Core Data Resources are a [email protected] informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Posthuman Conditions

2009 ◽  
Vol 0 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
Sigrid Weigel
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Third Culture ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
The Core

As empirical research in neuro- and life sciences is aimed at the core of humanities, they adopt those formulas of pathos like "intention", "mind", "identity" or "consciousness" which, after all, have long been analysed with regard to their symbol-theoretical and media-anthropological principles. Meanwhile, cultural as well as media sciences have established themselves – beyond the contrasting 'two cultures' – as a kind of third culture of knowledge and thus connect to traditions of thought like, for instance, Freud's theory of subjects or Benjamin's theory of media.

Allostasis and the developing human brain: Explicit consideration of implicit models

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 955-974 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara L. Ganzel ◽  
Pamela A. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Life Sciences ◽  
Developmental Stress ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
Explicit Consideration ◽  
Emotional Systems ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Stress And Health ◽  
The Brain

AbstractWe previously used the theory of allostasis as the foundation for a model of the current stress process. This work highlighted the core emotional systems of the brain as the central mediator of the relationship between stress and health. In this paper, we extend this theoretical approach to consider the role of developmental timing. In doing so, we note that there are strong implicit models that underlie current developmental stress research in the social and life sciences. We endeavor to illustrate these modelsexplicitlyas we review the evidence behind each one and discuss their implications. We then extend these models to reflect recent findings from research in life span human neuroscience. The result is a new set of developmental allostatic models that provide fodder for future empirical research, as well as novel perspectives on intervention.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document